Although AR has numerous uses and adoption is steadily climbing, developers complain about awareness as being a major challenge in developing or piloting an augmented reality app. The plurality, 35.3%, cited lack of awareness of the potential of AR within the general public as a major hurdle, while an additional 25% cited that same lack of awareness within their organization. Lack of tools specific to AR was the biggest challenge for 15%, while less than 5% said that a lack of expertise was their biggest issue.

Hardware is a consideration in developing augmented reality and virtual reality apps. A little more than a third of those developers working on AR or VR said they were mainly working on output devices, while 23% are concentrating their efforts optimizing for CPUs/GPUsd/ICs, since these types of apps are typically highly compute intensive.

“There are thousands of ways that augmented reality can be used to make the world more interesting and accessible through mobile devices,” said Janel Garvin, CEO of Evans Data Corp. “But the only way to really exploit the potential of AR or VR is through a robust developer community that is asking new questions and trying new things.”

The new Mobile Developer Survey, now in its 17th year, is a survey of developers currently developing or deploying mobile apps. It provides a margin of error of 4%. The full 237 page report includes sections on Demographics, Approaches to Mobile Development, Mobile Development Lifecycle, Development Environments, Enterprise Mobile Development, Targeted Platforms, Developing for iOS, Android and Windows, IoT and Mobile, Cloud and Mobile, AI Incorporation, Alternative User Interfaces, and much more!

AR and your Developer Program

A DevRelate blog post from December 2016, “Does your Developer Program support Artificial, Augmented, Virtual, Mixed, Merged, Hybrid, etc. Reality (AR/VR/MR)?“, gave an overview of AR/VR/MR developer programs, news and industry sites. There have been various forms of technology and non-technology based reality since the 1800s. The term “Virtual Reality” (VR) was coined by Jaron Lanier in 1978. Tom Caudell, a Boeing researcher, coined the term “Augmented Reality” (AR) in 1990. In 1994 Paul Milgram and Fumio Kishino defined a mixed reality. A more inclusive description is the 1999 Reality-Virtuality [RV] Continuum by Paul Milgram and Herman W. Colquhoun Jr. I’ve had the fun of using Microsoft Kinect (and write code for), Oculus Rift, and Google Cardboard in the past. There is so much more happening today with several low cost and high end devices including Facebook Oculus and Microsoft Hololens. Does your developer relations program support different AR/VR/MR devices and APIs?

Recently developers are heard about AR additions included in current and future versions of the iOS and Android platforms. Apple’s iOS 11 includes ARKit, a framework that allows developers to add augmented reality capabilities into their apps for iPhone and iPad. Google has added ARCore for Android to allow developers to combine the virtual and physical world in their apps.

If your developer program supports mobile application development, you’ll want to make sure that you provide your developers with use cases and sample projects to allow integration of mobile AR capabilities with your services, APIs, devices, frameworks, and devices.

About Evans Data Corporation

Evans Data Corporation provides regularly updated IT industry market intelligence based on in-depth surveys of the global developer population. Evans’ syndicated research includes surveys focused on developers in a wide variety of subjects.